Dan Speziale
April 29th, 2004, 01:54 am
Creating a Gaming Profile (http://www.techtv.com/callforhelp/livecalls/story/0,24330,3679129,00.html)
I saw this today on TechTV's "Call For Help". I tried it using Black Viper's site and instructions and I was amazed at the improvement in games. I was able to play the UT2004 demo maxed out. (My PC is a P4 2.8 GHz with 512M. I have an nVidia GeForce Ti 4400 card.) My system used to choke on that kind of play. It was as smooth as anything when I just played it!
Create a gaming profile
Warren from Williamsport, Pa., called to say he was told to shut down most of the background services to free resources when playing "Battlefield 1942." Should he set up a Windows XP profile with fewer programs running in the background for gaming?
Absolutely. Some startup items are specific to your login, so it's a good idea to create a minimalist user account for gaming. However most XP services start up globally. They're either on or off no matter how you log in. Go into your System Properties and the Hardware control panel to create the various hardware profiles you can select when starting up your computer. Black viper has a tutorial at his site (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/xpprofiles.htm). That site also has a list of services you can safely turn off.
Now I imagine that I'll try one of the less bare bones services for my own everyday usage when I'm not gaming. But I'm pretty amazed at the difference. Rebooting is necessary to switch between modes, but I think it's a small price to pay for this kind of performance boost.
P.S. Apologies if this is old news, but I thought it worth passing on.
Dan
I saw this today on TechTV's "Call For Help". I tried it using Black Viper's site and instructions and I was amazed at the improvement in games. I was able to play the UT2004 demo maxed out. (My PC is a P4 2.8 GHz with 512M. I have an nVidia GeForce Ti 4400 card.) My system used to choke on that kind of play. It was as smooth as anything when I just played it!
Create a gaming profile
Warren from Williamsport, Pa., called to say he was told to shut down most of the background services to free resources when playing "Battlefield 1942." Should he set up a Windows XP profile with fewer programs running in the background for gaming?
Absolutely. Some startup items are specific to your login, so it's a good idea to create a minimalist user account for gaming. However most XP services start up globally. They're either on or off no matter how you log in. Go into your System Properties and the Hardware control panel to create the various hardware profiles you can select when starting up your computer. Black viper has a tutorial at his site (http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/xpprofiles.htm). That site also has a list of services you can safely turn off.
Now I imagine that I'll try one of the less bare bones services for my own everyday usage when I'm not gaming. But I'm pretty amazed at the difference. Rebooting is necessary to switch between modes, but I think it's a small price to pay for this kind of performance boost.
P.S. Apologies if this is old news, but I thought it worth passing on.
Dan